Social philosopher, the founder of anthroposophy, born in Kraljevec, NW Croatia. He studied science and mathematics, and edited Goethe's scientific papers, before coming temporarily under the spell of the theosophists. In 1912 he propounded his own approach, establishing his first school of spiritual science, or Goetheanum, in Dornach, Switzerland. His aim was to integrate the psychological and practical dimensions of life into an educational, ecological, and therapeutic basis for spiritual and physical development. Many schools and research institutions arose from his ideas, notably the Rudolf Steiner Schools, focusing on the development of the whole personality of the child. Several are for children with special needs.
Rudolf Steiner (February 25, 1861 – March 30, 1925) was an Austrian philosopher, literary scholar, architect, playwright, educator, social thinker and esotericist.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual component.
He characterized anthroposophy as follows:
Biography
Childhood and education
Steiner's father was a huntsman in the service of Count Hoyos in Geras, and later became a telegraph operator and stationmaster on the Southern Austrian Railway.
In his childhood, Steiner was interested in mathematics and philosophy. In 1882, one of Steiner's teachers at the university in Vienna, Karl Julius Schroer, suggested Steiner's name to Professor Joseph Kurschner, editor of a new edition of Goethe's works. Steiner was then asked to become the edition's scientific editor.
In his autobiography, Steiner related that at 21, on the train between his home village and Vienna, he met a simple herb gatherer, Felix Kogutski, who spoke about the spiritual world "as someone who had his own experiences of it...." This herb gatherer introduced Steiner to a person that Steiner only identified as a "master", and who had a great influence on Steiner's subsequent development, in particular directing him to study Fichte's philosophy.
In 1891 Steiner earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Rostock in Germany with his thesis, later published in expanded form as Truth and Science.
Writer and philosopher
In 1888, as a result of his work for the Kurschner edition, Steiner was invited to come to the Goethe archives in Weimar to become an editor for the official complete edition of Goethe's works. Steiner remained with the archive until 1896. As well as the introductions for and commentaries to the resulting four volumes of Goethe's scientific writings, Steiner wrote two books about Goethe's philosophy: The Theory of Knowledge implicit in Goethe's World-Conception (1886) and Goethe's Conception of the World (1897).
During his time at the archives, Steiner wrote what he considered his most important philosophical work, Die Philosophie der Freiheit (The Philosophy of Freedom) (1894), an exploration of epistemology and ethics that suggested a path upon which humans can become spiritually free beings (see below).
In 1896, Friedrich Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, asked Steiner to set the Nietzsche archive in Naumburg in order. Forster-Nietzsche introduced Steiner into the presence of the catatonic philosopher and Steiner, deeply moved, subsequently wrote the book Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom.
In 1897, Steiner left the Weimar archives and moved to Berlin.
Steiner was among many (including Emile Zola) who wrote in defense of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish Captain in the French army falsely accused of treason.
Spiritual research
Beginning around 1900 and until his death in 1925, Steiner articulated an ongoing stream of "experiences of the spiritual world" — experiences he said had touched him from an early age on. Steiner aimed to apply his training in mathematics, science, and philosophy to produce rigorous, verifiable presentations of those experiences.
Steiner believed that non-physical beings existed everywhere and that through freely chosen ethical disciplines and meditative training, anyone could develop the ability to experience these beings, as well as the higher nature of oneself and others. Steiner believed that such discipline and training would help a person to become a more creative and loving individual.
Steiner's goal for his work was for it to be a development of the philosophical work of Franz Brentano - with whom he had studied - and Wilhelm Dilthey, founders of the phenomenological movement in European philosophy. Steiner was also influenced by Goethe's phenomenological approach to science.
Steiner set forth his spiritual research in a vast number of texts and lectures; Knowledge of Higher Worlds (1904/5), in which he describes his conception of a path of spiritual development, detailing many principles of life (openness, positivity, respect for others), spiritual exercises (control of thought and will, directed imaginations) and experiences likely to arise on this path (trials and spiritual perceptions).
Steiner led the following esoteric schools:
His independent Esoteric School of the Theosophical Society, founded in 1904. This was intended to have three "grades", but Steiner only developed the first one of these. Unlike most esoteric schools, all of the texts relating to the "School of Spiritual Science" have been published (in the full edition of Steiner's works). In 1906 Steiner became leader of a lodge called Mystica Aeterna within the masonic Order of Memphis and Mizraim, an affiliation that ended around 1914. Steiner added to the masonic rite a number of Rosicrucian references. (The figure of Christian Rosenkreutz also plays an important role in several of his later lectures.)Steiner and the Theosophical Society
A turning point in Steiner's life came in 1899, when he published an article titled "Goethe's Secret Revelation" on the esoteric nature of Goethe's fairy tale, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Steiner continued speaking regularly to the members of the Theosophical Society, becoming the head of its newly constituted German section in 1902. (It was also within this society that Steiner met Marie von Sievers, who was to become his second wife.) In 1904 Steiner was appointed by Annie Besant to be leader of the Esoteric Society for Germany and Austria, having made it clear that this school would teach a Western spiritual path harmonious with, but differing fundamentally in approach from, mainstream Theosophical paths.
The German Section of the Theosophical Society grew rapidly as Steiner lectured throughout much of Europe on his new spiritual science. Initially, there was a harmonious relationship of mutual appreciation between Besant and Steiner despite the divergences in their spiritual paths and teachings.
The Anthroposophical Society and its cultural activities
The Anthroposophical Society grew rapidly. Fueled by a need to find a home for their yearly conferences, which included performances of plays written by Eduard Schuré as well as Steiner himself, the decision was made to build a theater and organizational center. The building, designed by Steiner, was built to significant part by volunteers who offered craftsmanship or simply a will to learn new skills.
Beginning in 1919, Steiner was called upon to assist with numerous practical activities (see below). Steiner immediately began work designing a second Goetheanum building – made of concrete instead of wood – which was completed in 1928, three years after his death.
During the Anthroposophical Society's Christmas conference in 1923, Steiner founded the School of Spiritual Science, intended as an open university for research and study. Steiner spoke of laying the foundation stone of the new society in the hearts of his listeners, while the First Goetheanum's foundation stone had been laid in the earth.
Attacks, illness and death
The arson had a context. Threats had been made publicly against the Goetheanum and against Steiner himself.
Reacting to the catastrophic situation in post-war Germany, Steiner had gone on extensive lecture tours promoting his social ideas of the Threefold Social Order, entailing a fundamentally different political structure;
In 1919, the political theorist of the National Socialist movement in Germany, Dietrich Eckart, attacked Steiner and suggested that he was a Jew. In 1921, Adolf Hitler attacked Steiner in an article in the right-wing "Völkischen Beobachter" newspaper and other nationalist extremists in Germany were calling up a "war against Steiner". The 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich led Steiner to give up his residence in Berlin, saying that if those responsible for the attempted coup [Hitler and others] came to power in Germany, it would no longer be possible for him to enter the country;
The loss of the Goetheanum affected Steiner's health seriously. On the other hand, Steiner began a new, extensive series of lectures presenting his research on the successive lives of various individuals, and on the technique of karma research generally.
Philosophical development
Goetheanistic science
In his commentaries on Goethe's scientific works, written between 1884-97, Steiner presented Goethe's approach to science as essentially phenomenological in nature, rather than theory- or model-based.
Steiner defended Goethe's qualitative description of color as arising synthetically from the polarity of light and darkness, in contrast to Newton's particle-based and analytic conception.
Knowledge and freedom
Steiner approached the philosophical questions of epistemology and freedom in two stages. Here Steiner suggests that there is an inconsistency between Kant's philosophy, which postulated that the essential verity of the world was inaccessible to human consciousness, and modern science, which assumes that all influences can be found in what Steiner termed the "sinnlichen und geistlichen" (sensory and mental/spiritual) world to which we have access. Steiner terms Kant's "Jenseits-Philosophie" (philosophy of an inaccessible beyond) a stumbling block in achieving a satisfying philosophical viewpoint.
Steiner postulates that the world is essentially an indivisible unity, but that our consciousness divides it into the sense-perceptible appearance, on the one hand, and the formal nature accessible to our thinking, on the other. Steiner thus explicitly denies all justification to a division between faith and knowledge;
Truth, for Steiner, is paradoxically both an objective discovery and yet:
"a free creation of the human spirit, that never would exist at all if we did not generate it ourselves.A new stage of Steiner's philosophical development is expressed in his Philosophy of Freedom. (See the main article on the book Philosophy of Freedom for a fuller exposition.)
Steiner sees human consciousness, indeed, all human culture, as a product of natural evolution that transcends itself; He seems here to build upon Solvyov, whose description of the nature of human consciousness is virtually identical with Steiner's:
In human beings, the absolute subject-object appears as such, i.e.Spiritual science
In his earliest works, Steiner already spoke of the "natural and spiritual worlds" as a unity. From 1900 on, he began lecturing about concrete details of the spiritual world(s), culminating in the publication in 1904 of the first of several systematic presentations, his Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos, followed by How to Know Higher Worlds (1904/5), Cosmic Memory (a collection of articles written between 1904 and 1908), and An Outline of Esoteric Science (1910).
Steiner emphasized that there is an objective natural and spiritual world that can be known, and that perceptions of the spiritual world and incorporeal beings are, under conditions of training comparable to that required for the natural sciences, but including extraordinary self-discipline, replicable by multiple observers.
For Steiner, the cosmos is permeated and continually transformed by the creative activity of non-physical processes and spiritual beings.
Steiner termed his work from this period on Anthroposophy.
Breadth of activity
Steiner is certainly remarkable for the breadth of his achievements. in addition, a broad range of supportive therapies — both artistic and biographical — have arisen out of Steiner's work. One of first institutions to practice ethical banking was an anthroposophical bank working out of Steiner's ideas.
Steiner's literary estate is correspondingly broad. Steiner's writings are published in about forty volumes, including books, essays, plays ('mystery dramas'), mantric verse and an autobiography. (Much of Steiner's work is available on-line at the Rudolf Steiner archive, and Steiner's complete works are searchable at the German language archive). Steiner's drawings are collected in a separate series of 28 volumes.
Education
As a young man, Steiner already supported the independence of educational institutions from governmental control.
In 1919, Emil Molt invited him to lecture on the topic of education to the workers at Molt's factory in Stuttgart. Out of this came a new school, the Waldorf school, and Waldorf education — sometimes known as Steiner Education — which has grown to be one of the largest independent schooling systems in the world.
Social activism
For a period after World War I, Steiner was extremely active as a lecturer on social questions. One example is The Rudolf Steiner Foundation (RSF), incorporated in 1984, and as of 2004 with estimated assets of $70 million.
Steiner suggested that the cultural, political and economic spheres of society needed to be sufficiently independent of one another to be able to mutually correct each other in an ongoing way.
Architecture and sculpture
Steiner designed 17 buildings, including the First and Second Goetheanums. Three of Steiner's buildings, including both Goetheanum buildings, have been listed amongst the most significant works of modern architecture.
As a sculptor, his works include The Representative of Humanity (1922).
Performing arts
Together with Marie von Sievers-Steiner, Rudolf Steiner developed the art of Eurythmy, sometimes referred to as "visible speech and visible song".
As a playwright, Steiner wrote four "Mystery Dramas" between 1909 and 1913, including The Portal of Initiation and The Soul's Awakening.
Steiner also founded a new approach to artistic speech and drama;
Anthroposophical Medicine
From the late 1910s, Steiner was working with doctors to create a new approach to medicine. In 1921, pharmacists and physicians gathered under Steiner's guidance to create a pharmaceutical company called Weleda, which now distributes natural medical products worldwide. The approach was founded in the 1920s by Rudolf Steiner in conjunction with Ita Wegman, who carried the impulse forward after Steiner's death in 1925.
This approach to medicine begins from the proposition that true healing takes place when the body is stimulated to overcome the influences that are causing illness, whether these arise from its own constitution or the surroundings — whether they be poisonous substances, antagonistic organisms (bacterial or viral), or psychological states.
Biodynamic Farming
Biodynamic agriculture, or biodynamics comprises an ecological and sustainable farming system, that includes many of the ideas of organic farming (but predates the term). In 1924, a group of farmers concerned about the future of agriculture requested Steiner's help; Steiner responded with a lecture series on agriculture. Other aspects of Biodynamic farming inspired by Steiner's lectures include timing activities such as planting in relation to the movement patterns of the moon and planets and applying "preparations", which consist of natural materials which have been processed in specific ways, to soil, compost piles, and plants with the intention of engaging non-physical beings and elemental forces. Steiner, in his lectures, encouraged his listeners to verify his suggestions scientifically, as he had not yet done.
The early decades of the twentieth-century saw new methods of agriculture being proposed and used Steiner believed that the introduction of chemical farming was a major problem. Steiner was convinced that the quality of food in his time was degraded, and he believed the source of the problem were artificial fertilizers and pesticides, however he did not believe this was only because of the chemical or biological properties relating to the substances involved, but also due to spiritual shortcomings in the whole chemical approach to farming. Steiner considered the world and everything in it as simultaneously spiritual and material in nature, an approach termed monism. In other words, Steiner believed synthetic nutrients were not the same as their more living counterparts.
The name "biologically dynamic" or "biodynamic" was coined by Steiner's adherents.
Steiner and Christianity
Multicultural emphasis
Steiner was early in seeing the challenges of a multicultural society. His line of thought can be summarized as follows:
Many people, especially those of Eastern cultures, see the need for a spiritual basis for a culture. Steiner suggested that, without a reconciliation of these two, a clash of cultures would be inevitable. He suggested that the East (for Steiner, characteristically spiritually centered people and peoples) would only respect the West (characteristically people and peoples who focus on external reality and achievements) when a new spirituality arose in the West, a spirituality that united the achievements of both cultures.[15]
The Christ being as the center of earthly evolution
Steiner's writing, though appreciative of all religions and cultural developments, emphasizes recent Western (rather than older Hindu or Buddhist) esoteric thought as having evolved to meet contemporary needs.
Steiner emphasized, however, that:
Christianity has evolved out of previous religions, The being that manifests in Christianity also manifests in all faiths and religions, Each religion is valid and true for the time and cultural context in which it was born, The historical forms of Christianity need to be transformed considerably to meet the on-going evolution of humanity.[16] It is the being that unifies all religions, and not a particular religious faith, that Steiner saw as the central force in human evolution. This "Christ Being" is for Steiner not only the Redeemer of the Fall from Paradise, but also the unique pivot and meaning of earth's "evolutionary" processes and of human history, manifesting in all religions and cultures.
Steiner's Christianity differs from that of the Gnostics who viewed the Christ phenomenon through the knowledge gained through earlier gnosticism, whereas for Steiner, Christ's incarnation was a historical reality and a pivotal and unique point in human history. In a lecture explaining the relationship between Anthroposophy and Christianity, Steiner explained: "Spiritual science does not want to usurp the place of Christianity;
Divergence from conventional Christian thought
Steiner's views of Christianity diverge from conventional Christian thought in key places, and include gnostic elements. One central point of divergency is Steiner's views on reincarnation and karma;
Steiner also claimed that there were two different Jesus children involved in the Incarnation of the Christ: one child descended from Solomon, as described in the Gospel of Matthew, the other child from Nathan, as described in the Gospel of Luke. (The genealogies given in the two gospels diverge some thirty generations before Jesus' birth, and 'Jesus' was a common name in biblical times.) In Steiner's descriptions, the divine "Christ Spirit", the Son-God of the Trinity, incarnated in the Nathan Jesus at the moment of the baptism by John;
The Christian Community
In the 1920s, Steiner was approached by Friedrich Rittelmeyer, a Lutheran pastor with a congregation in Berlin. Steiner offered counsel on renewing the sacraments of their various services, combining Catholicism's emphasis on a sacred tradition with the Protestant emphasis on freedom of thought and a personal relationship to religious life. Steiner made it clear, however, that the resulting movement for the renewal of Christianity, which became known as The Christian Community, was a personal gesture of help to a deserving cause. It was not, he emphasized, founded by the movement known as "Spiritual Science" or "Anthroposophy," but by Rittelmeyer and the other founding personalities with Steiner's help and advice. The distinction was important to Steiner because he sought with anthroposophy to create a scientific, not faith-based, spirituality.
Reception of Steiner
Steiner's work has influenced a number of physicists, biologists, medical doctors, architects, philosophers, and artists. Research centers staffed by trained professionals in various fields of study do research along lines suggested or inspired by Steiner's ideas.
Authority
The high regard in which Steiner and Steiner's work are held within the Anthroposophical movement has been criticized by some critics as devotion to the point of uncritical belief. They have suggested that the fact that Dr. Steiner said something, rather than the verifiability of the statement, has been decisive.
Steiner himself seems to have noted this tendency, as he frequently asked his students to test everything he said, and not to take his statements on authority or faith. Nor was Steiner shy about saying that his works would gradually become obsolete, and that each generation should rewrite them. Individual freedom and spiritual independence are among the values Steiner most emphasized in his books and lectures.
Many anthroposophical writers emphasize the importance of individual freedom and thought, and there is considerable diversity within anthroposophical thought. Nevertheless, a critical approach to the works of Steiner is not as common as some would like and not always welcomed within some Anthroposophic circles.
Given Steiner's clear statements about political democracy being the proper kind of State for humanity, his consistent and emphatic support for liberty and pluralism in education, religion, scientific opinion, the arts, and in the press, not to mention his rejection of the idea that the State should take over economic life - one cannot justly link Steiner or his movement with a totalitarian intent;
My meeting with Rudolf Steiner led me to occupy myself with him from that time forth and to remain always aware of his significance...We both felt the same obligation to lead men once again to true inner culture.
—Albert Schweizer
Controversies
Rudolf Steiner's views on race and ethnicity
Steiner believed that humanity is made up of individuals first and foremost, each of which exists sui generis: as a unique entity unto him- or herself, and that each individual passes through incarnations in changing settings; For Steiner, race and ethnicity are thus transient characteristics, not essential aspects of an individual. Steiner also emphasized that race was rapidly losing any remaining significance for human civilization.
Yet in 1888, and later, Steiner was vocal about assimilating the Jews, their religion, culture and even their "way of thinking".
At the same time, Steiner described what he believed to be the particular characteristics of races, ethnic groups, nations and other groupings of people. For these reasons, reception of Steiner's ideas about race has ranged from sharp criticism of these as racist to warm praise of his uncompromising stance against racism.
Bibliography
The style and content of Steiner's works can vary greatly. Therefore, while it might be stimulating to read a single lecture or book by Steiner, it would probably be a mistake, having read even four or five of his books, to suppose one has a representative picture of the whole body of his work. Many works are available in web versions through the Rudolf Steiner Archive. The full German texts of all of Steiner's published works is searchable at the Rudolf Steiner Archiv. A list of all English translations of all works by Steiner is available at this site.
Out of the 350 volumes of his collected works (including more than forty volumes containing his writings, and over 6000 published lectures), some of the more significant works include
Steiner's writings
Books
Goethean Science Truth and Knowledge (doctoral thesis) Philosophy of Freedom (1894) E-version ISBN 1-85884-082-0 also published as Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path ISBN 0-88010-385-X Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception (1886) Mysticism at the Dawn of Modern Age (1901/1925) Christianity as Mystical Fact (1902) Cosmic Memory: Prehistory of Earth and Man (1904) Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos (1904) ISBN 0-88010-373-6 Anthroposophy and the Inner Life (also published as Anthroposophy, an Introduction), Lectures from 1924 or 1925. (A very difficult but very powerful introduction) How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation (1904-5) ISBN 0-88010-508-9 The Education of the Child (1907) An Outline of Esoteric Science (1910) ISBN 0-88010-409-0 Four Mystery Dramas - The Soul's Awakening (1913) Toward Social Renewal (1919) Fundamentals of Therapy: An Extension of the Art of Healing Through Spiritual Knowledge (1925) An Autobiography (1924-5)Articles about social renewal
Reordering of Society: Capital and Credit (1919) Reordering of Society: Requirements of Spiritual, Social and Economic Life (1919) Reordering of Society: The Fundamental Social Law (1919)Steiner's lectures
The subjects of the over 6,000 published lectures by Steiner are classified by the publisher as follows (see complete catalog in pdf format):
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